IP: Obit John Tukey, 85, Statistician Who Coined 2 Crucial Words (Software & Bit)

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>
>John W Tukey is the 'Tukey' in the 'Tukey-Cooley' FFT
>
>Interesting Obit follows:
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>July 28, 2000
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>John Tukey, 85, Statistician Who Coined 2 Crucial Words (Software & Bit)
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>By DAVID LEONHARDT
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>John Wilder Tukey, one of the most influential statisticians of the
>last 50 years and a wide-ranging thinker credited with inventing the
>word "software," died on Wednesday in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 85.
>
>The cause was a heart attack after a short illness, said Phyllis
>Anscombe, his sister-in-law.
>
>Mr. Tukey developed important theories about how to analyze data and
>compute series of numbers quickly. He spent decades as both a
>professor at Princeton University and a researcher at AT&T's Bell
>Laboratories, and his ideas continue to be a part of both doctoral
>statistics courses and high school math classes. In 1973, President
>Richard M. Nixon awarded him the National Medal of Science.
>
>But Mr. Tukey frequently ventured outside of the academy as well,
>working as a consultant to the government and corporations and taking
>part in social debates.
>
>In the 1950's, he criticized Alfred C. Kinsey's research on sexual
>behavior. In the 1970's, he was chairman of a research committee that
>warned that aerosol spray cans damaged the ozone layer. More
>recently, he recommended that the 1990 Census be adjusted by using
>statistical formulas in order to count poor urban residents whom he
>believed it had missed.
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>"The best thing about being a statistician," Mr. Tukey once told a
>colleague, "is that you get to play in everyone's backyard."
>
>An intense man who liked to argue and was fond of helping other
>researchers, Mr. Tukey was also an amateur linguist who made
>significant contributions to the language of modern times. In a 1958
>article in American Mathematical Monthly, he became the first person
>to define the programs on which electronic calculators ran, said Fred
>R. Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who is editing a book on
>the origin of terms. Three decades before the founding of Microsoft,
>Mr. Tukey saw that "software," as he called it, was gaining
>prominence. "Today," he wrote at the time, it is "at least as
>important" as the " 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes
>and the like."
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>Twelve years earlier, while working at Bell Laboratories, he had
>coined the term "bit," an abbreviation of "binary digit" that
>described the 1's and 0's that are the basis of computer programs.
>
>Both words caught on, to the chagrin of some computer scientists who
>saw Mr. Tukey as an outsider. "Not everyone was happy that he was
>naming things in their field," said Steven M. Schultz, a spokesman
>for Princeton.
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>Mr. Tukey had no immediate survivors. His wife of 48 years, Elizabeth
>Rapp Tukey, an antiques appraiser and preservation activist, died in
>1998.
>
>
>Mr. Tukey was born in 1915 in New Bedford, a fishing town on the
>southern coast of Massachusetts, and was the only child of Ralph H.
>Tukey and Adah Tasker Tukey. His mother was the valedictorian of the
>class of 1898 at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and her closest
>competition was her eventual husband, who became the salutatorian.
>Classmates referred to them as the couple most likely to give birth
>to a genius, said Marc G. Glass, a Bates spokesman.
>
>The elder Mr. Tukey became a Latin teacher at New Bedford's high
>school, but, because of a rule barring spouses from teaching at the
>school, Mrs. Tukey was a private tutor, Mrs. Anscombe said. Mrs.
>Tukey's main pupil became her son, who attended regular classes only
>for special subjects like French. "They were afraid that if he went
>to school, he'd get lazy," said Howard Wainer, a friend and former
>student of John Tukey's.
>
>In 1936, Mr. Tukey graduated from nearby Brown University with a
>bachelor's degree in chemistry, and in the next three years earned
>three graduate degrees, one in chemistry at Brown and two in
>mathematics at Princeton, where he would spend the rest of his
>career. At the age of 35, he became a full professor, and in 1965 he
>became the founding chairman of Princeton's statistics department.
>
>Mr. Tukey worked for the United States government during World War
>II. Friends said he did not discuss the details of his projects, but
>Mrs. Anscombe said he helped design the U-2 spy plane.
>
>In later years, much of his important work came in a field that
>statisticians call robust analysis, which allows researchers to
>devise credible conclusions even when the data with which they are
>working are flawed. In 1970, Mr. Tukey published "Exploratory Data
>Analysis," which gave mathematicians new ways to analyze and present
>data clearly.
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>One of those tools, the stem-and-leaf display, continues to be part
>of many high school curriculums. Using it, students arrange a series
>of data points in a series of simple rows and columns and can then
>make judgments about what techniques, like calculating the average or
>median, would allow them to analyze the information intelligently.
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>That display was typical of Mr. Tukey's belief that mathematicians,
>professional or amateur, should often start with their data and then
>look for a theorem, rather than vice versa, said Mr. Wainer, who is
>now the principal research scientist at the Educational Testing
>Service.
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>"He legitimized that, because he wasn't doing it because he wasn't
>good at math," Mr. Wainer said. "He was doing it because it was the
>right thing to do."
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>Along with another scientist, James Cooley, Mr. Tukey also developed
>the Fast Fourier Transform, an algorithm with wide application to the
>physical sciences. It helps astronomers, for example, determine the
>spectrum of light coming from a star more quickly than previously
>possible.
>
>As his career progressed, he also became a hub for other scientists.
>He was part of a group of Princeton professors that gathered
>regularly and included Lyman Spitzer Jr., who inspired the Hubble
>Space Telescope. Mr. Tukey also persuaded a group of the nation's top
>statisticians to spend a year at Princeton in the early 1970's
>working together on robust analysis problems, said David C. Hoaglin,
>a former student of Mr. Tukey.
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>Mr. Tukey was a consultant to the Educational Testing Service, the
>Xerox Corporation and Merck & Company. From 1960 to 1980, he helped
>design the polls that the NBC television network used to predict and
>analyze elections.
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>His first brush with publicity came in 1950, when the National
>Research Council appointed him to a committee to evaluate the Kinsey
>Report, which shocked many Americans by describing the country's
>sexual habits as far more diverse than had been thought. From their
>first meeting, when Mr. Kinsey told Mr. Tukey to stop singing a
>Gilbert and Sullivan tune aloud while working, the two men clashed,
>according to "Alfred C. Kinsey," a biography by James H. Jones.
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>In a series of meetings over two years, Mr. Kinsey vigorously
>defended his work, which Mr. Tukey believed was seriously flawed,
>relying on a sample of people who knew each other. Mr. Tukey said a
>random selection of three people would have been better than a group
>of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey.
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>Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company